Friday, March 24, 2017

Debate with a Utilitarian, revived!

Back in January I posted the transcript of a lengthy debate I had with an "authoritarian utilitarian" I called Sean. The debate died down after a few weeks, but this week he reanimated it. We left off here, and his eventual response is below:Sean:I'm
guessing it's been a while since either of us looked at this – JRTC, change of
command shenanigans, and moving over to be HHC XO took up most of my time these
past few months. But, if you've the time, I'd like to continue.

Perhaps
you can clarify something for me: so, are you a deontologist or a utilitarian?
You keep using utilitarian ends in your arguments, so I'm confused as to what
your frame is. During your discussion of smallpox, you argue voluntary
individual efforts and private organizations made great strides in reducing
incidence of the disease: “the number of deaths from smallpox was cut in half
by mostly voluntary means” “The will was there, the expertise was there, the
non-governmental organizations were there...” “Did mandatory vaccination
policies effectively stifle that resistance, or intensify it?”, etc. These
statements imply that reducing incidents of the disease was the end goal, not
the preservation of liberty or self-ownership. During your discussion of
private vs public systems, you made the following statements: “and yet, today,
we recognize that the purely private system of shoe provision works
brilliantly...practically everyone can afford a pair of shoes, and nearly
everyone owns several.” “I firmly believe that the poor stand the most to gain
from it”. These imply that the market is merely a tool to increase the material
well-being of the participants – a utilitarian goal. During your direct
responses you write “By all means, let's save people! It isn't saving people I
have a problem with. Theft is what I don't like”, “I posit that if our
wealthiest taxpayers were the saintly reincarnations of God himself...and
decide that in their efforts to do the greatest good for the greatest number of
people on earth, they could frankly get better bang for their buck with a very
different allocation of resources”, “And if we piece this back into your hiker
analogy, we're left with a friend who declines to call 911 because he has a
better idea”, “Smart, compassionate people can disagree...about the best way to
utilize scarce resources towards the betterment of mankind.”, “And this is
where my third condition comes in: the existence of alternative, peaceful means
of solving global problems that lack the tempting perception of immediacy, but
so often work much better and much faster than the state”. These all assume “the greatest good for the greatest number” as an end
goal and freedom/liberty as a means towards that end. A utilitarian cares
about these ends and indifferent towards the means. A deontologist cares about
the means and is indifferent towards the ends. Picking and choosing elements of both is a philosophical contradiction,
as the two systems are entirely incompatible. So under which frame do you
operate?

And,
it's fine if you use the utilitarian frame - we can continue arguing over the
proper ratio of market forces to government intervention is optimal in the
economy and what forms each might take. Markets and governments are both tools
towards a higher end. The rest is then agreeing upon metrics (we already have
one metric in the Quality-Adjusted Life Year (QALY) already in use in public
health policy to allocate resources) and then calculating the optimal policy.

You'll
have to bite the bullet either way, though. Either you care about the system or you care about the end. The
point of the hiker analogy was to force this kind of decision - either freedom
or utility. The cell phone represents resources, the injured hiker represents
those in need of resources, and the friend's attitude represents an
unwillingness to apply all of those resources to aid another.

The
central question of the analogy was this: when considering what action to take,
which is priority: the freedom of your
friend or the welfare of the hiker? From the language you used, it seems as
though the welfare of the hiker was the primary concern - utilitarianism. Your
hesitation to overpower the friend was based on assuming he would also help the
hiker, not based on his right to his cell phone - "I cannot fathom
overpowering my friend in such a situation as the one you described, if only because
I do not know any acquaintances who would insist on keeping their phone in
their pocket at such a time". "If only...". The only thing
keeping you from intervention is the assumption that you both shared the same
goal: the welfare of the hiker.

Me: Our
central disagreement comes from this line: “Picking
and choosing elements of both is a philosophical contradiction, as the two
systems are entirely incompatible.”I made it clear from the outset that I think
that’s a false choice. I also made it
clear that I’m happy to defend libertarianism on utilitarian grounds for your
sake, and the many times you quoted me doing this are examples of that.But when you ask me to clarify whether I am a
deontologist or a utilitarian, the simplest answer is “neither,” because
neither convince me as standalone moral philosophies.They each have elements of truth, but neither
tells us all we need to know about moral behavior.

I am hardly unique in this regard: barely
anyone on earth is a perfectly devout deontologist, and barely anyone is a
perfectly consistent utilitarian (of course, most people don’t even know what
those words mean, but if you give them surveys testing how they think we ought
to act in hypothetical situations, their choices consistently reveal that most of
us borrow from both frameworks, and others too).I don’t think it follows that the moral
beliefs of everyone on earth except an enlightened few are ridiculous,
hypocritical and invalid.I think it follows
that whatever it means to “do the right thing” is informed by BOTH of those
competing values.

By analogy, communism and capitalism are
incompatible ideologies which directly contradict one another – and yet, it may
be that the best economic systems are hybrids of the two.“Draft and develop” and “buy the best free
agents” are incompatible philosophies for building a baseball dynasty, and yet
it may be that the best franchises employ a hybrid of the two. Likewise, we should not always refrain from killing or stealing, but nor should we always disregard
the means employed in pursuit of a greater good.

Neither deontology nor utilitarianism
adequately encapsulates the complexity of human moral intuition: that fundamental,
deeply embedded sense of right and wrong which for most people serves as the
litmus test for resolving ethical questions.They are each but partial truths, revealing portions of a more
complicated whole; like yin and yang, as complementary as they are
contradictory.They cannot both be
completely correct at the same time, but this only makes them wholly
incompatible to a dogmatist.They can both be partially correct, as opposite
poles of a spectrum of moral perspectives on which there exists a happy middle
ground.

The answer to the question “Do the ends
justify the means?” is “sometimes.”We
need a system to identify those times.That’s
what my three conditions (remember those?) were all about: bridging the gap
between two insightful but flawed moral worldviews to create a more holistic
(if less simple/formulaic) conception of human morality.To return to your
analogy, you ask “which is priority: the freedom of your friend or the welfare of the
hiker?” My conditions respond: “it depends.” Such
a question presupposes that those things are in contrast.If you were 100% certain that
those things were in contrast, and that ONLY by overpowering your friend you
would be able to save a life, I’d agree with you that the welfare of the hiker
takes priority.But in real life, you
are never 100% certain, and we need a framework that navigates real life.Recall
some other quotes from my initial response: at the beginning “the hiker analogy is flawed because it
builds-in assumptions about its characters that don’t hold true among the real
world entities those characters are supposed to represent.” And at the end,
“this is where my third condition comes
in: the existence of alternative, peaceful means of solving global problems
that lack the tempting perception of immediacy, but so often work much better
and much faster than the state.”

So
I’ll repeat: welfare matters.Outcomes
matter – of course they matter.But so do the means, which means
unless you’re damn sure the outcome will be better, and there’s no other way to
make it better, you should be extremely wary of using violence to get your
way.“First, do no harm.”Have a strong bias against force, because
deontology has important ethical insights too.